[TUHS] Illumos )

[Andy Kosela]

On Mon, Jan 5, 2015 at 11:04 AM, Jacob Ritorto <jacob.ritorto at gmail.com> wrote:
> Here's my favourite Solaris coffin nail: Oracle's last five years of
> lawnmowing, almost zero innovative milestones and clueless customer base and
> community erosion and desecration.  I do now agree that Solaris is finally
> and irredeemably dead.  Their lack of understanding and stewardship has
> tragically transitioned it from the being the definitive unix system to, in
> essence, a proprietary firmware for expensive iron.  But in the same breath
> I'd also assert that Illumos and its derivatives have taken all the good
> from it, continue to drive the fork forward in a wonderful variety of ways,
> and are the repo- and distros-of-record for this flavour of unix.

This is your way of putting history together, but I think that
objective view on the matter potray this a little bit differently.  I
personally know a lot of Fortune 500 shops still using Oracle Solaris
and happily migrating from Solaris 10 to Solaris 11, instead of
embracing Illumos and myriad of its incarnations.  You know why?

There could be only one answer -- all of those shops depend heavily on
other technologies provided by Oracle like databases and middleware,
and by sticking to one support vendor they actually save a lot.  There
is even more -- I see an increasing trend in adopting Oracle Linux in
enterprise in place of Red Hat Enterprise Linux also because of the
integration with Oracle databases and other Oracle technologies.

It is a shame that Oracle closed Solaris source, but to be honest
their integration of hardware and software is still unmatched if you
ask me.  If you take a look at their hardware and software plans they
have pretty solid plans going into 2019 for new new CPU's and Solaris
versions[1].  Their T4 and T5 chips are pretty sweet and perform
really well as compared to x86; they still also put a lot of
improvements into ZFS[2], so to say that Oracle Solaris is dead is a
gravely exaggeration.  In contrast Joyent is still just a small
start-up.  And start-up's come and go as we have seen recently with
the history of Joyent spin-off TextDrive run by Dean Allen.  I don't
see Oracle going anywhere in the next 25 years or so.

just my .02
--Andy

[1] http://www.oracle.com/us/products/servers-storage/servers/sparc/oracle-sparc/sparc-roadmap-slide-2076743.pdf
[2] https://blogs.oracle.com/darren/en_GB/entry/new_zfs_encryption_features_in